Panel Statement
Panel: On the Persistence of Hardware
In this proposal, it is submitted to approach the digital technologies through the question of their materiality. To do this, the references will be taken from theoretical and conceptual propositions by some french philosophers. It means the philosophical conceptions on new technologies concerning the materiality that emerged from the exhibition named “Les immatériaux” or “The immaterials” by Jean-François Lyotard in 1985, conceived in the context of the postmodern condition, and until the essay “Economy of hypermaterial and psychopower” published by Bernard Stiegler in 2009, and analysed in the situation that he calls a hyperindustrial society in an ultramodern perspective, this without forgetting the specificities of digital art defined by the artist Edmond Couchot and the philosopher Norbert Hillaire in their book “Digital art, or when the technology comes to the art world”, edited in 2003. Electronic, computer program, virtual interfaces, all constituents of the computer, make seem the digital as immaterial. Electronic by its intangible physical appearance, the computer program by its calculation and its languages, systems that are already symbols, and so, some abstractions. Don’t we call a computer an abstract machine? But, how about that? The immaterial has been used by Lyotard to define the new state of plastic art produced with computer, but also its simulated texture composed by complex calculations. And here is coming the program and its central role in the working of computer: it is a specificity of the digital, up to Couchot and Hillaire. But for Stiegler, the invisibility of the material does not make it disappear : in the contrary, the infinitely little is still a state of material, and the problem to consider is the form of the materiality as an information. This paper would like to develop a sort of historical definition and conception of the new technologies of information through these philosophical concepts.
- Colette Tron was born in 1968 in Marseille, France. She works in the fields of communication and language. After having worked in cultural journalism, she is currently working as a writer, using different mediums of communication of language (radio, books, theater, audiovisual, multimedia…), and in questioning their function experimenting with creation that is specific to each one. She collaborates with artists from different disciplines, in France and elsewhere. She participates in festivals reading poetry, writing and interpreting her texts for sonorous creations, collaborates into collective projects using electronic and digital technologies, and participates in colloquiums with forms of writing-NTIC as their theme. By founding the association Alphabetville in 2000, she has created a place of reflection around the rapport between language and the media, technic and art, aesthetic and society, and tries to articulate the practice and theory by dialoguing with the artists, researchers and cultural operators involved and publishing the results of the researches.
Full text (PDF) p. 2428-2433